My advice with freelancing is honestly to keep saying yes to shit you want to do....and to do this, if you're in-house especially, the advice people give that you should never work for free EVER at all is bullshit lol and will limit you in the long run. I think a lot of people don't know how to negotiate rates and value and that everyone should be paid for work but freelance in the creative arts does require just sort of wheeling and dealing a bit. Be discerning and figure out who you want to work with and why.

If you already have a job, chase the shit you love doing. Practice. Post self-done project stuff and promote it. Build affiliations around the stuff you like. To that point am an incredibly insane type A person probably more than I let on here. I do things like make frequent lists of my immediate network and triage them based on what I could do for the people there and how I want to do it.

Here's an anecdote to that effect: Last March when I went to AWP I went and spoke to people at tables, made conscious efforts to follow up, and when I got home I made a shortlist of presses I wanted to work with. When I got laid off last June I immediately reached out to one of the presses and said hey, can we work together, etc. Said I didn't care what the rate was as long as it was moderately compensated and ended up with a 4-month contract to do some freelance, crushed it, and then when that press had a collaborative piece coming out with another publication I offered to do image work for them for free. I pulled out all the stops in my creative and now a year later my first major pre-press job (with a much much fatter paycheck) is with the press I did that work for. It will lead to other lucrative work as well if I play my cards right. Halfway through that I also linked with Night Gallery because I was emboldened by the other shit I'd done especially as a local merch designer (again working for free) and since then I've landed two major artist contracts for merch that all paid over $2k and also have done well selling work with Night Gallery. I would never (and could never) have approached some of those clients without doing free/passion work first but moreover I built a brand by affiliation.

I think the reason I sometimes bristle at the "never ever work for free" piece of advice is that a freelance career really is built by you--you're in charge. If you're doing this on the side you can decide which jobs you take on for experience. Build a network and a personal brand and re-negotiate the rates once you meet people who can and will pay you more. Think carefully about who and what you want to be associated with.

The other thing about this approach: a lot of the most disastrous freelance jobs I've had are the ones where someone is paying me a nominal fee of like $200 to do a lot of work. (I know I said I was "moderately compensated" for that work before--it was more than $200 lol.)

IMO, If you're working for free there's an understanding that 1) you're doing this as a collaboration and it gives you more freedom to make something your own (very important for brand building) 2) you can set reasonable timelines. I genuinely think that in many cases no money > almost no money LOL. Not that way every time but I've found the hell-spot is when someone thinks of you as "a client" but underpays you ESPECIALLY if it's work you do not enjoy doing and that doesn't help your personal brand. Take the cheap work for stuff you'd do for free, take the free work for stuff you'd do for free, take the check once people understand who you are.

Labyrinth on the portico of the cathedral of San Martino at Lucca, Tuscany, Italy